May 20, 2019 – Our time machine travels back to the Northern Ontario, Canada of 1934, to witness a unique and risky series of births. Through the eyes of fictional midwife Emma Trimpany, we’ll meet the Dionne family. They’re humble farmers eking a living out of the land, when they’re blessed with not one but five bundles of joy — the first identical quintuplets to survive birth. But the story turned dark when the ...

May 6, 12019 – Our time machine travels back to the nuclear nightmare at the Soviet Union’s V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station — as destined to fail, as the political system of its namesake. On April 26, 1986, Reactor No. 4 exploded, and in the 30 years since, a name that few in the world could have placed, has become synonymous with radioactive Armageddon. What really happened? Communist propaganda long obscured the story of t...

April 22, 2019 – We welcome a familiar face back into our time machine, and travel back to a parched New York City, suffering from a drought that began in a sweltering 1949, and stretched into 1950 with no end in sight. Desperate for rain, Mayor William O’Dwyer hired Dr. Wallace E. Howell, a handsome, 35-year-old meteorologist out of Harvard who approached weather modification as a cool-headed scientist, not a Music Man-style huckster. W...

April 8, 2019 – Our time machine welcomes aboard book lovers live at the Meet the Author Series presented by Mayda Bosco at the Closter Public Library in New Jersey. Together, we travel back to the Brooklyn and Massachusetts of the pre- and post-World War 2 era, for a tale of sibling strife that’s as old as Cain and Abel. This is the engaging, absorbing story of two very different sisters, Ruth and Millie Kaplan. Raised in Brooklyn...

March 25, 2019 – In this episode, our time machine travels back to post-World War 2 Israel. When we arrive, we’ll follow its return to statehood — beset by enemies on three sides and their back against the sea on the fourth — through the eyes of two fictional brothers and the woman they love. Our guide on this journey is Martin Fletcher who brings us Promised Land: A Novel of Israel. In it, we meet characters shaped in ...

March 11, 2019 – Our time machine travels back to the American Civil War for a look at the toll paid by civilians and the countryside trampled under the boots, hooves and wagon wheels of rampaging armies. We’re all familiar with the devastation wrought on soldiers, but after a century-and-a-half, those sacrifices have become romanticized — and battlefields once soaked with blood and littered with corpses, are now pristine nat...

February 25, 2019 – We welcome a familiar face back into the passenger seat of our time machine. It’s Tom Clavin, who we last chatted with about the book, Valley Forge, he co-authored with Bob Drury. Tom returns solo with the definitive true story of James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok. A soldier in the Civil War, spy for the Union, scout, lawman, gunfighter, gambler, showman, actor, and romantic, he crossed paths with Gene...

February 11, 2019 – We welcome one of our favorite authors back into our time machine. It’s Neal Bascomb. We last caught up with him in Nazi-occupied Norway for the bone-chilling tale of The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler’s Atomic Bomb. Neal’s latest book is The Escape Artists: A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War. It’s the tale of Allied airmen set out to...

January 28, 2019 – Mark Braude, who we chatted with previously about his book: Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle, brings us the tale of a legendary military leader who’s almost too big for the word legend. Napoleon Bonaparte of France. We meet the titan of France not at the peak of his power, but at his low-point: Cast out, kicked off the throne, and walking among the citizens of a tiny island as one of the...

January 24, 2019 – Our time machine transports us back to the Savannah, Georgia, of 1858, where we’ll meet Charles Lamar. Ignoring the law of the United States, Lamar organizes the transportation of hundreds of Africans aboard the yacht Wanderer. This criminal act strikes a hammer blow on the fault lines of America society, marking the first importation of human beings as slaves in four decades. Piecing together the true story with...

EPISODES

After three years of hosting almost all our 150+ interviews for The History Author Show, I maintain my love for the magic of books and admiration of the people at all levels who bring them to us. But like Mr. Henry Bemis in the iconic Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last,” there are always more books than hours to read. So I’m hoping that the occasional written Q&A will allow me to touch base with and prom...

December 31, 2018 – Our time machine travels back to a two-mile sliver of land in New York City’s East River. Since 1971, it has been known as Roosevelt Island. But the Victorians knew it as Blackwell’s Island, a dreaded name synonymous with illness, insanity, poverty, prisons and purgatory. You could suffer there for a variety of crimes, or for things as simple as being a woman walking alone late at night, an immig...

December 17, 2018 -Our time machine welcomes aboard Winston Groom, acclaimed author of Forrest Gump, for a seat at the conference table with the Big Three. The book is The Allies: Roosevelt, Stalin, Churchill and the Unlikely Alliance That Won World War II. It’s a fresh look at the interactions between these very different men as they navigated the fight against Hitler and the inevitable stresses of a culture clash between demo...

December 3, 2018 – In this episode, our time machine turns Zamboni and hits the ice for the greatest fanned shot in sports marketing history, when the New York Islanders — a decade removed from their four-in-a-row Stanley Cup dynasty of the early ’80s — chose a new mascot that resembled nothing so much as frozen food pitchman The Gorton’s Fisherman. Joining us to do color commentary is our friend Nichola...

November 19, 2018 – Our time machine hauls out the big, bulky Speed Graphic camera and watches the ultimate watcher of watchers in 1930s, ’40s and ’50s New York City: Arthur Fellig. Helping haul the tripod around to various crime scenes and disasters is Christopher Bonanos who brings us Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous. Even if you don’t know the name, you’ve seen his gritty images from the 1930s through...

November 5, 2018 – Our time machine soars over the Great War’s trenches — and gets down and dirty on ground level — through the eyes of a pilot in the very early days of U.S. air power. Our guide on this journey is Patrick Gregory, co-author of An American on the Western Front: The First World War Letters of Arthur Clifford Kimber 1917-18. Written along with his mother-in-law, Elizabeth Nurser (Kimber’s ...

October 22, 2018 – Our time machine travels back to “the times that try men’s souls,” when Thomas Payne wrote that phrase to embody the struggles of Gen. George Washington’s beaten-but-not-broken army and the precarious cause of American independence. In their new book, Valley Forge, #1 New York Times best-selling team Bob Drury and Tom Clavin provide a fresh look at the winter of 1777. In it, they introduce u...

October 8, 2018 – Our time machine travels back to America’s experience in the Great War through the eyes of former president and hero of the Spanish-American War Theodore Roosevelt, whose four sons suited up to fight over there. Leading us through basic training is David Pietrusza, author of TR’s Last War: Theodore Roosevelt, The Great War, and a Journey of Triumph and Tragedy. In David Pietrusza’s book, we g...

September 24, 2018 – Our time machine welcomes aboard infamous bank robbing-legends Bonnie and Clyde, as they tear a gash across 1930s America at the height of the Great Depression. Returning to ride shotgun with us on this crime spree is Jenni L. Walsh, who we chatted with about her debut novel, the stand-alone origin story Becoming Bonnie. Jenni’s sophomore book isn’t a sequel, but the edge-of-your-seat crime spre...

September 10, 2018 – Our time machine rockets to the moon — and misses — aboard the ill-fated Apollo 13. Saving the day is the African-American woman whose mathematical know-how guided the trio of Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise safely back home. As a child, Katherine Johnson loved math, and triumphed with her family’s support to learn despite segregated schools of the day. Bringing an out-of-this-wor...